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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#721

Post by robertlagrant »

lolinder wrote: post #659
animal_spirits wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off…

The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent. A…

> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets

What does this mean?

> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#722

Post by jahsome »

raydiak wrote: post #650
jahsome wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading your comment as "someone should have done something a long time ago so it's not worth considering the consequences of doing it now." That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.

This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something. Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

I disagree with every single thing you said.

I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted, and it's a literal fantasy to imagine doing something 20 years ago.

I'd like to point out I wasn't being dismissive, at all. Sorry you read into it that way.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#723

Post by nl »

lolinder wrote: post #695
animal_spirits wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk. If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have val…

I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment? The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effec…

It’s possible to reject the argument that consumers seeing ads is the same as monetary payment.

I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.

I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#724

Post by crossroadsguy »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

I don't have the right answer for this as in how to handle this - but this is needed.

Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#725

Post by nullifidian »

echelon wrote: post #507
fsh wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with. Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge. I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google…

I've been using "quasi-monopoly".

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#726

Post by yoaviram »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

If what you are saying is that significant parts of the tech landscape will change, then that's exactly the point.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#727

Post by HappMacDonald »

RajBhai wrote: post #708
handoflixue wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone would still be paying for email. Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.

I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage. Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.

* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.

* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].

1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput... 2: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#728

Post by ddalex »

barbazoo wrote: post #506
sofixa wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we're still in the "get them hooked" stage where AI startups and Google/Meta are losing money on AI. Once they start properly monetising (aka making users pay for what it actually costs them to train and run), it will be a different story. The vast majority of people won't pay $20-30€/month for an LLM to replace their search engine. (And an analysis I saw of OpenAI's business model and financial indicated the…

They’ll instead accept being manipulated and fed content influenced by money, be it ads or individualized content that somehow serves whoever is paying for it.

Read that again, but slowly.

Of course the AI answers will be subtly manipulated as it will be directly content influenced by money

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#729

Post by dev_l1x_be »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#730

Post by rootsudo »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad...

I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?

And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.

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